AP with the veterans and theory becomes clearer

[Christoph Boeckle]

This thread is especially meant as an advice to newcomers who want to make sense of the articles and sometimes abstract talk going on in various threads.


How to learn to understand theory

A lot has been said about all the knowledge being all over the forum and the articles being outdated or whatnot. People call for introductory and summary documents. While those would certainly be nice, there's another way of learning that I'd like to talk about.

I came to the Forge a few years ago a bit by chance, looking for advice on how to run and design games. I read loads of threads and articles, but I think it's pretty easy to see from my comments that I was more often than not beside the real important points. It's still pretty vague and abstract in lots of regards. Even reading actual play posts by others only got me to the "knowing" tier.
Usual advice is: play the darn games!
I fully agree it is the best way to pass from "knowing" to "understanding" the theory.
But it is even more effective to play the games with people who already understand this. It avoids lots of fumbling around and helps identifying old habits (of which quite a few have blocked my understanding on a number of occasions).

If you don't know anyone personally, I guess you can play at conventions.

Or you could do it via IRC, as I did.

I played in Mike Holmes' Heroquest game and was directly exposed to bangs, kickers and meaningful character generation (relationships that drive your character and ultimately the whole game was especially an eye-opener).
What's more, I once more saw that game prep is not about planning things in advance, but rather having elements ready that can fire off action easily. A lot of it has to do with characters that have goals, flaws, relationships, etc. Things that are meaningful for a character in game. The GM can just use those on the fly and other players too!
And then Mike says something in the lines of: "Oh, by the way, see all those situations where the characters have to make a decision that tells something about them? Does Bob the human give that elf a hand? If the player gets to make a meaningful decision, something that matters, that's narrativism. See you next week!"
Why yes of course! It's nothing academic nor complex nor abstract. Having been involved in those kind of scenes gives you a whole different understanding than any number of reads ever will, in my opinion.

I've just started playing DitV with Harald (Oliof) and Ivan, and discovered a new take on conflict resolution. I guess I will now have a better understanding of future discussion on the board.


Anyway, what's important is not the things I'm talking about, but how I got to learn them. Through actual play with people in the know.


I thus encourage those who've got nobody to play with or are wary of throwing these weird games at their players to check out the #indierpgs channel on the irc server linuxguy.magistar.net (more info)
Chat with the guys, ask for directions and you'll find yourself in a game in no time, with people who are familiar with all this theory stuff.

[Ron Edwards]

Great post, Christoph. I'd love to see it rounded out with one teeny thing ...

... what's a good in-game example of playing your HeroQuest character in satisfying way? Who was the character, what was the situation, and what did he do? What was your experience of playing during that time?

Best,
Ron

[Christoph Boeckle]

The Heroquest game was more of a global understanding experience. There's no definite scene or character that embodies it precisely and concisely.

Perhaps this one:

Sebastian, a PC more or less in charge of what we could call a refugee camp has a relationship kind of mechanic that's called "Hunted by Guild". First thing that happens in the session, Mike frames a scene where an assassin hired by that guild creeps up on Sebastian and menaces to kill him if he doesn't follow nicely.

That's an example to illustrate what I was meaning by "Things that are meaningful for a character in game. The GM can just use those on the fly and other players too!"
This made me think about Vincent's claim about character sheets not being the character, but just a way to help us remind stuff that will be useful to portray the character in game, where he really is. (I hope I don't mess up his ideas...)
Now why did I find this important? I'm used to the classical character "backgrounds" being a good 3-4 A4 sheets long, and in the end not doing anything much at all.
I learned playing the Pool that traditional character background is not that important (and what Director stance is). I learned with that HQ session that you can actually write things about the character which form the very basis of play.


I can offer a longer example from the DitV game though.

My character, whose drive is to help victims of society, had the "Help somebody to stop drinking" as an Accomplishment stake.
Harald frames a scene where an Elder's freshly married (and young) wife comes stumbling out of the house, obviously completely drunk. She drops over, and Brother Ebenezer, my character, runs over to help.
The Elder Brother doesn't like that at all, and we start a conflict with the stake "Does Ebenezer get to help Sarah out of drinking?".
Okay, that's conflict resolution coming up, and stake setting put practically (that's quite a bulk of forge discussion put into practice).
So we start narrating (Raising and Reversing and Raising and Dodging and...) and then, all of a sudden, Harald advances quite a bit chronologically, describes my character trying to approach Sarah on a few occasions, only to be chased off by her husband or the dogs. Then it's my turn to react.
But heck, he just advanced days in one single conflict! And it makes perfect sense when looking at the narration.
So I had more or less digested conflict resolution on the scene scale before that, and now I see that we can go much farther than just one scene. Whole story-arcs can be just one conflict. Things happen, the story moves on. (transcript with mechanical comments)

This means a lot to someone coming from a background of task-resolution (one turn is 3 seconds long, so let me see, this action takes...) and "20 minutes of fun in 4 hours".


Of course I "knew" some of these things from reading the Forge on a regular basis. I even played some indie games with my regular group, trying to figure out stuff and explaining things I was only half sure of to players who haven't a clue what the Forge is.
But nothing beats being shown by someone who knows, during a game, and then going back to the theory. Higher state of awareness, hosanna and that kind of stuff.

So if any new reader is following this thread, and has this concept they'd like to grasp better...

[Christoph Boeckle]

Forgot proper crediting: the character Sebastian is played by Thomas (LordSmerf)

[Frank T]

Yeah, I've had my eyes opened to indie RPGs via netgaming, too. It's a painful process to play in IRC, but it's just great to game with people who are on the same page as yourself. Even if they are not as experienced as Mike Holmes. It already helps immensely that they are committed and have read the rules (hopefully). When gaming with your buddies back home, odds are you'll have to convince them of the game while you're still trying to figure it out yourself. Which is tough.

Primetime Adventures, for example, none of us had ever played before when we started our first IRC game. So we figured it out together. That was possible only because we all really wanted to do it.

- Frank